Mr. Edward Fennessy:

I will get back to Deputy O'Reilly's question about the farmers being denied payments for small and minuscule disputes about land. First and foremost, I would say that we are not part of the process of stopping any payments. We have only powers of persuasion and we come two years after the event. The errors we report are overpayments that have not been detected. A significant number of the errors we find should have been found by the national administrations, and we put that at about 50%.

The payment process and the process of applying for aid under the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund, EAGF, is such that one has a certain number of entitlements. For each of these entitlements one must have a minimum area of land to activate the entitlements. We empathise with those farmers whose payments are being delayed because of that. I would surmise that these are cases where they have a critical shortage of land to activate all the entitlements they have, and this comes down to the following. There are issues with the land parcel identification system which the Deputy has rightly pointed to. We have pointed these out for a number of years and we will produce a special report later in the year. My understanding, from talking to the paying agency, is that the Irish paying agency claims to be the most efficient in terms of getting payments out. It makes more than 99% of payments on time compared with the UK, for instance, where there are serious difficulties in getting payments out because of the collapse of its new computerised system. The Irish would consider themselves to be way ahead.

With regard to some of the other questions, there was an issue about too much cap doffing. I do not believe there is. I believe the Irish have a healthy respect and disrespect for authority, in like order. If there is any cap doffing, it is in our own public interest, perhaps to get more funds, and we are pretty good at that.

Deputy Kyne asked a question about public procurement contracts and how some skulduggery might go on after a contract has been awarded. That can happen. That is why we pay a lot of attention to the public procurement rules to ensure that before a contract is given, the rules in terms of the accessibility of all potential customers are fair and fairly applied.

We have pointed out cases over many years where those rules can be circumvented, where contracts can be carved up and where subsequent additional amounts can come into play. The initial contract is rather meaningless, accordingly. Many things can happen in public procurement, but in terms of the statement of assurance, we can only look at the issues that have to be addressed at the granting of a contract. We can look subsequently through special reports at the reality of what happened to contracts when concluded. We have pointed out numerous discrepancies in what has happened in reality.